Posts in "Domain of Ones Own"

Below is a somewhat summary of the talk I gave in conjunction with Amy Collier, Daniel Lynds, and Jim Luke at OpenEd17. The tl;dr is that I’m convinced that need to start publishing analyses of the open platforms we adopt in order to bring transparency to a number of metrics to include not just data ownership and stewardship but broader metrics such as who has monetary vested interest in the success of the product. As I’ve returned home, I’ve began to construct in my head a real tangible way in which we can start to build a community to do this work, much of which is being inspired by Jon Udell and Mike Caulfield’s collaboration on Digital Polarization. If any of this sounds in the smallest bit interesting, please comment or reach out.

Situating My “Open”

When I find myself at OpenEd, I often feel the need to explain myself. As smarter people than myself have mentioned, the word “open” itself is often a moving target. So I want to quickly give some context to how I interpret open. David Wiley wrote in April that whether you are talking about OER, open access, open source, etc. They all involve two things:

Free access.

A formal grant of rights and permissions normally reserved by the original creator.

This implies open as an end product. So I’ll go ahead and say I see open as an end product less interesting. Open as a space that can produce open products: I find much more interesting. I’m equally weird though in that I don’t necessarily blindly subscribe to open pedagogy. I’m also less interested in open as a pedagogical strategy than I am open as a digital environment for situated learning, communities of practice, and identity construction. For me, much like how Lave and Wenger positioned communities as practices, it’s much more of a learning theory than a pedagogical practice.

Legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational form, much less a pedagogical strategy or a teaching technique. It is an analytical viewpoint on learning, a way of understanding learning.

At OU we’ve tried to position our Domain of One’s Own project, OU Create, as a space to be inhabited (or in contrast—not inhabited, maybe abandoned). Yes, it fits the definition of free access and of specific permissions. But it doesn’t have to.

I often go into classrooms to lead demonstrations on how to use our domain platform (and I do want to call it a platform and highlight that because I’ll come back to that point later), and I’ll tell the students what it means to register a domain. That’s it yours. That you own it. That you own the data. And you can take it with you after this class, after you graduate, or not. Long term, it’s your garden to tend to and you can decide whether you want to.

And often I’ll get a student who wants to contest me on the issue. Do we really own this? Does this mean I can do with it what I want? Can I decide whether it’s public or private? Etc.

And the answer to all of those questions is yes. What’s interesting is that I’ve never had a student ask about ownership of their textbook or ownership of their LMS course.

As an institution, OU Create has lent us the opportunity to talk about what does it mean to give students their data. How do we define data and how do we support that notion of taking it? What obligation do we have to help them to protect the data? What do we mean when we say we respect a students privacy? How do we support free speech?

I want to be clear and say that I’m not trying to say that domain of one’s own is the best and only solution for having these conversations. In the same way that I believe forcing someone to stand for a pledge to a flag defeats the purpose of a pledge to a flag, I believe requiring someone to own their digital identity defeats the point of ownership as ownership is a choice. Openness is simply the ingredients in which someone is afforded the opportunity to make that choice.

Misinformation and Platforms

But as someone who is often thinking critically about the types of virtual spaces we require our students to enter, I think this moment in time is a better wake up call than ever to reconsider those spaces—including the open ones. I don’t think anyone was surprised to hear that Facebook and Google have been required to turn over Russian-linked data to the federal government for investigation. It’s been reported recently that YouTube, Tumblr, and even Pokemon Go also turned over data. Shame on you if you didn’t see that one coming.

As both a faculty member and practitioner in journalism, I care deeply about these issues, specifically fake news, and have found Mike Caulfield and his work on digital polarization to be a canary in a coal mine. Mike has recently argued, while citing a Stanford History Education Group study, that the issues involved in disinformation extend well beyond the concept of fake news. The black and white argument is there’s hoax sites and “real” news. But there’s a large grey area. Intention is much harder to recognize, pull apart, and understand. As Mike said at 10:30am, in quite possibly the quickest citation ever, the problem is we are all vulnerable to charges of biasness.

I’ve been thinking recently about how we begin to apply these analysis techniques used for evaluating information or disinformation and apply them to platforms. What metrics should be using to evaluate OU Create as a platform? In recognizing not all open is good and closed is bad, that’s its much messier than that, how do make sure we are continuing to be critical of OU Create knowing that it’s ultimately still just a platform for data creation and possibly dissemination.

As I find the conversation in the OpenEd community start to concentrate around platforms–specifically OER textbook platforms–I want to ask to what standards are we holding these platforms accountable? Further, how can students evaluate these tools and the company’s practices and intentions?

One website I often show my students is Terms of Service; Didn’t Read. This site is a community collaboration that seeks to offer both easy to read explanations of the Terms of Services for popular sites like Google and YouTube (and even gives it a letter grade!). Here’s some of the questions they are trying to uncover:

Do you control the copyright of your content on this platform?

Can your content be removed at any time without prior notice?

Do they monetize your data for third parties?

Is your content permanently deleted if you delete it?

Do they contribute their developments as open source projects?

Can the terms be changed at any point without notice?

These are indeed some of the right questions and are really helpful. Unfortunately for my own need, they’ve only gone deep into a few platforms, a lot of their findings are inclusive, and very few have overlap with edtech.

In 2012, Audrey Watters develop The Audrey Test, a set of yes or no questions for edtech products that goes beyond TOSDR to include some of the questions more specific to education

Do you work closely with instructors and students to develop your product?

Do you offer data portability to students?

Do you offer an API?

Do you meet accessibility standards?

And, finally, do you have a revenue strategy that involves something other than raising VC money?

I like that last question because it does get us closer to understanding the intent of the company in developing the platform (Note: Part 2 of the test is equally valuable). Now I want to tread lightly here knowing that we have many attendees this year that are either looking to give or receive funding. I don’t mean to say external funding is bad, but I don’t also want to say it’s always good. What I do believe is that it’s really helpful when organizations that receive funding are open and transparent about what they’ve received, who they received it from, what the funders intentions are, how that money will be utilized, etc.

I bring up this conversation because when the revenue model for the web is inherently either selling content, advertising, or a mix of both, these questions help inform what happens to student’s data and the topic of this conversation. And as much as I was to speak towards DoOO with rhetoric such as student agency and digital identity, all of these ideas hinge on just that–data.

I want to end with a few recommendations:

As a community, we need a more comprehensive strategy for how we evaluate open and OER platforms. It has to extend beyond access to permissions to include business model, growth model, and intent, but am still not certain what that comprehensive list looks like. One example is the live annotation of Slack’s Privacy statement that was led by Kristen Eshleman and Bill Fitzgerald.

We need to continue to be willing to be critical of those within our community and we need to allow others to be critical of our own work. Caulfield also told us we all have biases. And for when our own biasnesses fail–and they fail–we need to support those beyond the institutions whose critical analysis of our practices is necessary. At this point, there’s really only one person and that’s Audrey Watters and she’s such a much needed voice. So please support her.

Last, I want to echo some of the comments we heard in David Bollier‘s keynote: the conversation needs to extend beyond end-products like open source, open websites, open textbooks, to be thinking about what I was referring to as “open as a situated learning space” or what he refers very wisely refers to as the commons.

Over the years, my main course web project, PR Pubs, has became one sprawling beast. For the most part, people know prpubs.us as the homepage for the course, but I haven’t actively used that space for a few semesters. Thus, in May I made it one of my summer goals to rework prpubs.us in such a way that both narrates and preserves the history of the course and the space. The story of Pubs is an epic one with many twists and turns. Once upon a time, it started as a blog feed, morphed into a full open course, vacationed for a summer on the Jekyll CMS, and is now more integrated with Canvas, our LMS. Nothing really captures this story well and for good reason: I’ve tried counting and I believe it’s existed in eight separate places since 2014. In fact, out of all the spaces, my own personal blog is probably the best representation of the evolution:

I got interested in archiving a bit more while visiting Middlebury College last Fall where they’ve started a project out of their library to preserve student web work at the request of students. I should also mention that Kin Lane has been a major inspiration in helping me see the benefit of static sites. The point being that I’ve known good and well that no CMS is in for the long term. I’m a data pack rat so I’m always thinking about the long term.

At the heart of every course site has been the blog feed powered by the FeedWordPress plugin. Students are writing between 250-500 total blog posts per class per semester. I’ve systematized the process of preparing for the next batch of PR Pubsters. Every semester, I clone a clean version of my syndication hub which is already preloaded with theme, plugins, and custom code that I need to make it work. Over the past couple years, I’ve probably done this a dozen or so times across various courses and thus end up with a ton of WordPress instances.

Eventually, the semester ends and these 250-500mb spaces of content become dormant. There are tasks that I’ve done in the past to close a course site which basically involves unsubscribing to student feeds. But recently I’ve decided that for better preservation purposes, I would rather have a fully static HTML version of each course site. In a lot of ways, it feels like I’m putting it sites on a diet. “Why consume all of those data-dense databases?! Stick your macronutrients: HTML, CSS, and JS! Get rid of your addiction to Cigawordpress!”

What are the upsides to doing this?

You know no longer need WordPress or any other CMS to be the engine of the site. The biggest benefit is that you are less vulnerable to becoming infected through an out-of-date theme or plugin. If you aren’t actively updating the site, you are making yourself susceptible to a lot of mean people on the web.

You can host it on any type of web server.

You can even just keep it locally on your computer and access it via your web browser.

Because of it’s portability, it’s much easier to share a static site as an open education resource (OER). You could even host them on Github allowing people to create forks of the site if they so choose.

Jim Groom turned me on to a tool called SiteSucker a few months back because that guy is always thinking a step ahead of me… SiteSucker does exactly what I laid out earlier. And Jim lays out a strong argument:

I don’t pay for that many applications, but this is one that was very much worth the $5 for me. I can see more than a few uses for my own sites, not to mention the many others I help support. And to reinforce that point, right after I finished sucking this site, a faculty member submitted a support ticket asking the best way to archive a specific moment of a site so that they could compare it with future iterations. One option is cloning a site in Installatron on Reclaim Hosting, but that requires a dynamic database for a static copy, why not just suck that site? And while cloning a site using Installatron is cheaper and easier given it’s built into Reclaim offerings, it’s not all that sustainable for us or them. All those database driven sites need to be updated, maintained, and protected from hackers and spam.

Side note: Isn’t it always a let down when you are trying to write a blog post and you realize that someone has already made your argument and in a much more succinct fashion I might add? That Groom! But, nevertheless, I’ll continue on in hopes of imparting a little bit more wisdom…

Sitesucker grabs your site contents and converts it into HTML, CSS, and JS. You can also set how many links deep you want to pull content. For me, I wanted to grab all my students blog posts, but I didn’t necessarily want the links they were referencing in their blog posts, so I went three levels deep (front page, pages, blog posts).

What are the downsides?

Because it is a static site, it can no longer make dynamic calls. Dynamic calls are when pieces of the web resource are being constructed when the URL is first called. This includes comments, searches, and other organization features like categories and tags that are native to WordPress. Now SiteSucker will generate a copy of these dynamic calls and turn them into static, but after that they will cease to function. None of the content disappears but it can’t be regenerated, so no new comments. This isn’t a big deal for me considering the sites are completely dormant, but it does sting a bit to lose search functionality.

You need to understand basic HTML and CSS to make any significant edits to the site after it’s in it’s static state. Remember, you longer have access to the nifty WordPress WYSIWIG editor. This is where the OER argument gets tricky. Yes, it’s more portable, but potentially less editable depending on the user’s knowledge.

John Stewart was kind enough to test it for me with prpubs.us and it worked like a charm. I then went and grabbed static versions of the other course sites followed by hitting that scary “delete” button in Installatron which made the WordPress instances go away.

Last, I redesigned the prpubs.us front page to better tell the historical narrative of the course. There you can find images of past versions, full information on the technologies that powered each, and links to the archived versions.

Hopefully this is a much more helpful resource for visitors and student alike. Either way, I feel like the state of the health PR Pubs is at an all-time high. Here’s to surviving.

I’m just getting to the point of the summer in which I have about two weeks to catch my breath before the bulk of my summer work activities get underway. This break allows me enough time to quickly catch up on some blogging I’ve been wanting to do.

We just wrapped up our fourth academic year our Domain of One’s Own project. In January, I put together a little infographic to show where we stand metrics wise. We end the year just north of 4,500 total domain orders meaning that had roughly 700 orders in the Spring semester (likely our biggest Spring yet). Much of this is due to the fact that we are finishing up a project to transfer users off of the university’s old system (faculty-staff.ou.edu), which gave you a cool 10mb of web space.

We started off with 701 total users from the old system and John Stewart as been slowly chipping away at notifying users, assisting with migration, and setting up redirect URLs from their old space. We’ve heard from roughly 220 of the 700. 130 of them already had OU Create, and 70 have asked for assistance.

Of the remaining users, less than 20 have made any changes since 2015 and over 400 of them have made no changes to their site in the last five years. So I’m feeling pretty confident that we’ll have all of the remaining active users taken care of by June.

To the Creaties and Beyond

We bookend the semester with the second round of the OU Creaties. The Creaties is an event we’ve held twice now to celebrate top work on the open web (not just limited to OU Create). It’s also an opportunity to say thank you to our biggest classroom champions. This year was a complete overhaul on the event side. Last year’s event was a plate award style banquet. We learned that it’s hard for people to come to an event like that so we shifted it to a finger food style reception. More than 50 users attended–a big bump from last year.

Panoramic of 50+ people who came to the 2017 Creaties. Thanks from the bottom of my open heart for celebrating our love for the web with us pic.twitter.com/YnhhzvoM3Y

We also showcased more work than ever before. John and Keegan had the brilliant idea of setting up monitors at each booth that ran a slideshow of various sites. John also built a new version of the Creaties site (create.ou.edu/creaties) which now showcases more than 40 student projects.

The site is visual bliss for someone like me to see the work of our community. It’s also a great landing spot for those who want to show people what the end result of open web projects can be so be sure to save that link.

Two main projects I want to point out are both the winner of the student division as well as a special MIS project. There’s rightful criticism that Domain of One’s Own can quickly become WordPress of One’s Own. And as a WordPress superuser, I’ll rightfully defend WP as an incredibly powerful and well-developed tool. But I also think there’s a misconception that WordPress is all that happens, and I think that’s mostly because the two easiest ways to see what’s happening on a campus domains projects is to 1. subscribe to RSS feeds and 2. look at application installs and both of these methods favor WordPress projects.

Two projects that were arguably the biggest hits at the Creaties this year were both non-Wordpress projects. The first was done by an MIS student who took a data of courses at OU and made a calendar visualizer which helps you see when classes are scheduled on a calendar view (a feature that currently doesn’t exist at OU) using MySQL, PHP, Bootstrap, and SASS. Check it out at schedule.oucreate.com.

What’s neat about this project is that most of OU MIS courses deal with Microsoft databases. This gave the student a look at MySQL and allowed them to build a front end user interface that will now live on at OU past his tenure, which is pretty awesome. This is the second MIS project that I’ve came across on OU Create (I wrote about the other in October 2015 here) and I’ll excited to see if this picks up speed in that department. The Creaties bonus was that I actually got to MEET this student and his faculty member after admiring virtually the work for so long.

The second was a professional landing page project from a graduate student named Shayna Pond in our College of Ed. She has a background in animation and built a couple of BEAUTIFUL animations using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.

Sticking with building her site on the shoulders of Adobe, her site was built using Adobe Muse, a product that I’ve played around with lightly but want to check out a little more. It’s got a drag-and-drop interface to it that seems to be pretty nice for generating static sites and probably sits somewhere Adobe’s product line in-between Dreamweaver and Adobe Spark.

The Summer of Domains Love

We’ve got a couple of big ticket items on the docket for the summer. One is that John and Keegan are putting together an event called WebFest next week. I’ll let Keegan write the full take on this once it’s finished, because I know it’s his baby and he’s thought really long and hard about it, but I’ll say that it’s one way we’ve evolved in approaching domains not just as a CMS hosting solution but also a way to broaden the understanding of the ins and outs of the web through web literacy. As we get more mature into our OU Create project and we’ve seen changes in the web climate over the past four years, we’ve become even more passionate about not just giving out websites but also educating folks on the web. This summer project is pure experimentation, but I know Keegan’s work and it’s nothing if not rich learning experience. Registration is still open by the way.

Last, but no means least, we are hosting the first Domains conference, Domains 17, in a couple of weeks on June 5 and 6. More than anything, I’m honored that Reclaim Hosting felt it was fitting to do this event here first. I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous hosting 75 people I deeply admire in my backyard, which means this event probably feels more like a wedding to me than anything else. Jim Groom and Lauren Brumfield have both done excellent write ups (see our full RSS aggregation of blog posts re: domains 17 here) on what to expect so I will spare rehashing the details. But I will say that what I’ve tried to inject into the conference is a sense of community building and not just information dissemination, which the Reclaim folks have been really receptive too. I’ve curated some activities that will give people a glimpse at the best that my community has to offer and I guarantee it will be a TON of fun (think arcade bar and rooftop party fun hint hint). For those coming, thanks for believing in the little city on the prairie and I look forward to seeing you soon!

Much of the conversation was around (what I’m assuming) is a central point of Martha’s upcoming talk is/was that the web has been infiltrated by monetized centralized apps which run counter to the both the openness and decentralization that the web was built on and higher ed could have done something to stop it if it wanted to do so (and maybe we still can).

This is supposed to be what we do: educate the the next group of citizens about how knowledge is shared and created and what values are enacted in knowledge. Instead of engaging that and building that and informing our communities about that using the voices, platforms, and institutions that we have; instead of doing any of that we bought LMSs. – Martha Burtis

Tim Owens brought up a point (18:20) about people wanting a “fast food” approach to creating a domain that streamlined the process of getting up and running, which I think is arguably one of the most unfortunate products of this new web we live on. Companies are so focused on converting a person to a user as fast as possible that they strip all work out of the equation and instead provide people with a menu of options. “Do you want the light theme or the dark theme?” “Here. We’ve suggested you follow these people based off ‘your interests.'”

I’ve thought recently about how I can expose to my students how this is now happening. I’ve seen graphic design software also move towards a templated approach to design rather than building from the ground up, and I’ve come to conclusion that there are use cases for both approaches, but you don’t know that unless you’ve lived in both worlds. It is through these exposures that I think students have the ability to build a critical palate for the technology they use.

I’ve always taught Adobe products, not necessarily because I think they are the best value, but because they are the industry standard (and are supported by the College). If I say the term “Photoshop,” the majority of the public can at least recognize it. I feel that a large part of my job is to prepare students to work within the advertising and public relations industry, so I try to teach the tools they use such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Premiere. It also doesn’t hurt that these are all packaged together and can be purchased together which brings an added benefit to learning the suite.

I also feel it’s my job to teach far beyond the tools. I teach a lot of communication strategy, copywriting, and criticism. Beyond being critics of their own work, I also want my students to have enough experience with a tool to know its affordances. This means that after every tool I have them compare and contrast it with a previous tool we’ve used.

I’ve started introducing Canva as a graphic design tool. Canva is a very user-friendly web-based design platform. Unlike Photoshop/InDesign/Illustrator which are a massive tools with nearly unlimited possibilities and can take years to master, Canva is inituitive enough to learn through a small set of tutorials. You can upload your own graphics, place text, and draw shapes. The biggest advantage of Canva is that it has several preset sizes (brochures, posters, social media assets such as posts and cover photos, etc.) as well as templated designs for each of these sizes and assets. It’s monetization model is that they sell stock photography and graphics inside the platform. In a lot of ways, Adobe tools are even LMS-like in the sense that they have built and iterated on over a long time and can feel bloated. Canva feels very light weight. It’s also worth mentioning that Adobe has rolled out, as Adobe tends to do, it’s own Canva-like tool Adobe Spark.

So how do students anecdotally react to a week in Canva? Anecdotally, I’d say that the 2/3 of the students, first and foremost, like the break from Adobe products, but they also love the simplicity of it.

Wow, I love Canva. I don’t know if I have ever found anything so user-friendly and professional. Using it, I was able to create several different types of social media graphics for my internship at Trifecta Communications. (source)

In my opinion, this gives the best argument for how to use Canva: emphemeral social media graphics that can be completed by anybody at any level of knowledge.

But students who have become used to the flexibility of Adobe platforms also note the downsides. 1.) You’re relying on platform uptime and 2.) limited options can limit your output and templates can stifle your creative process:

Oh Canva – so easy yet so fidgety. I was crossing my fingers the whole time hoping it wasn’t going to crash on me. Canva was sooooo slow on my laptop and on most of the Gaylord desktops. It is NOT a reliable source. InDesign and Photoshop won’t crash on you. This will. BUT Canva is easy. If you are looking for something fast and effective Canva is for you. Canva is limited though. There are ENDLESS possibilities with InDesign and Photoshop but Canva has its own layouts, texts, frames etc. and thats it. So you can only be as creative as Canva allows but for a PR practitioner who doesn’t know how to work InDesign and Photoshop this tool can be really helpful. I think, for me, I would like to use Canva in the future maybe for inspiration but then create my own thing in Photoshop or InDesign. (source)

As I mentioned in the tweet, Medium does allow the student to (sort of) “own” their space (“owning” here meaning it wasn’t provisioned by the institution) and it does allow for, albiet limited approach, syndication. And, as Laura mentioned, it can help tap into an already existing community which might be very beneficial for Seth’s course which is doing feature writing as opposed to personal blogging.

Am I saying use Medium instead of a Domain of One’s Own approach full stop? Of course not. But all of us are able to have this informed conversation about the platforms because we all have enough experience to recognize the affordances of the platform.

So what’s the point that I’m trying to make with my students? Once you’ve spent enough time in platform, you have the platform literacy to be critical of other platforms that exist in the world. Students can’t gain that knowledge if the instructor prescribes one platform.

One thing I’ve come to learn intimately through OU Create is that students will likely have a difficult time seeing the value of the domain if they aren’t contrasting it against another tool. I loved the recent way in which Erika Bullockframed domains NOT as the place for her to develop her digital identity but as a way for her to develop her understanding of the web:

Now, I am in my Senior spring. I have 7 sub-domains, all of them incomplete, all of them spaces for me to try out new WordPress themes, widgets, fonts, and layouts. I use sub-domains to model web projects for work, to try out new layouts for my personal website, or just to see if I can create a project that I’m envisioning in my head. I have benefited from thinking of Domains as my digital sandbox.

Through prescribing multiple graphic design platforms throughout the semester, I am hopeful that my students are building a palette towards which tools work in various scenarios. I also hope that we’ll continue to see ways to diversify experimentation in web spaces with the increasing interest in light weight, non-database CMSs and static site generators. And, last, hopefully we’ll stop searching for the perfect tool but rather search for an increase in web literacy across all platforms.

Jim also wrote a blog post about this conversation too, as he mentioned, we’re going to attempt to continue to have these pre-conference conversations. We’ve got Jon Udell talking hypothes.is and web interopability. If you have an idea for a pre-conference conference or if you want to join one of our conversation, comment or reach out.

To continue the palate analogy, I feel like I’m getting just a taste of what Domains 17 will be like and I’m liking it. Be sure to register as soon as possible.

I want to tell a quick story as an example to show how we are starting to see how investing in a simple project like Domain of One’s Own is creating a better web student ran web outside of the project itself.

Back in October, I had the pleasure of meeting with the editorial board of the OU Daily, our on-campus newspaper, to demo something I had been cooking up for some time.

I met Dana Branham, OU Daily editor-in-chief, for the first time in February 2016. At the time, she was online editor and had recently written a post on her personal domain on OU Create, our Domain of One’s Own initiative, that walked through how they had recently used CartoDB for one of their stories on earthquakes in Oklahoma. I was deeply impressed with the blog work she was doing both at the Daily and as a Global Engagement Fellow. Her domain is RICH.

So I cold-called her hoping that she would be willing to meet me for coffee. I wanted to pick her brain about how 1. we could be helpful either to reaching more students or 2. with Student Media. She mentioned that she was really interested in trying to do some feature stories in the same fashion as the famous NYTimes Snowfall project and that got my mind spinning.

While the idea stayed in the back of my head, things didn’t come back around until after I met with Seth Prince, the Student Media Design Adviser. We connected over Twitter where I posted about enjoying how his Feature Writing class was using Medium as it’s course platform.

We would physically connect at an adjunct orientation for the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where we both teach, and would eventually setup a coffee meeting at the same Starbucks where I had met Dana six months prior.

Eventually, we got smart and all connected around a table. Seth and Dana decided they wanted to move forward with experimenting with some of the same technology we were using with OU Create for some of their feature work. The idea was take an exposé they did on how the football rallied around the SAE incident to bring the team closer together. The story is called How SAE Fueled an Oklahoma Turnaround. It’s a really good story and has some embedded media such as pictures and videos, but the team at the Daily had done so much reporting on SAE that we wanted to bring in other pieces like some Timeline.JS work, embedded tweets, and links to other OU Daily stories. So I offered to redesign the story domains style and get back with them.

Dana was kind enough to send me a Google Doc with the story and she commented out some ideas of pieces that could be connected through the new site. As the designer, I wanted to come to really understand the tone. I would read a sentence or two, close my eyes and try to visualize the story. And then I would highlight certain words and annotate some ideas. I would also try to break the story up into what I thought would make good sections.

I started to piece together in my mind this story of dark. The focus on race; a wet night and following morning; the football players wearing all black. So I wanted it to be black and white with muted tones and I wanted to accentuate the weather as best as I could.

What I showed to the editorial board is below (on the real version the video isn’t as shaky though).

I made a clone of the site so they could peak at the code a little bit if they wanted to. While I was doing that, they were able to get a subdomain setup on oudaily.com and install WordPress.

Let’s stop and spend some time there. OU Daily moved to their latest news-oriented content management system ~10 years ago. It’s a CMS that’s used by a lot of news organizations and it’s best known for being very stable software and ad friendly. While they use different CMSs for other Student Media sites, this really is a big first for OU Daily. And in my opinion a big deal because they now have a ton of flexibility when it comes to story presentation.

But back to the matter at hand… Yesterday, the OU Daily dropped their first story with the new look. It’s a story that focuses on the difficulties students are having in accessing mental health care on campus and it’s absolutely gorgeous. I’ve made the screenshot below scrollable but I highly suggest that you check it out in full technicolor as well.

A couple weeks ago I was having coffee with my friend Rob Reynolds who works outside of OU but uses Reclaim Hosting for his education technology business projects. He asked me a really good question which was “How do you specifically measure the success of OU Create?” I’ve learned that this is a really tricky question in education technology. Yes, we need to measure what we are doing. Yes, we need to prove our value, so-to-speak. But what does this mean within technologies whose goals are not necessarily to “improve X” or “be adopted by X% of faculty”?

A danger I find in edtech is that there are mechanisms you can build into your technology in efforts to build whatever narrative out of the data that you want to build. It is believed that we can answer these types of questions by tracking clicks, surveilling our users, and then “discovering” the answers within the data. And this entire premise runs counter to what we believe is a core reason for why OU Create exists–to provide a space where users can learn about data, data ownership, data privacy, and data transferability.

Here’s what my answer was to Rob’s question and here’s how I hope to answer this question. With any new technology or technology paradigm, we need to be more like R&D than we do IT. To me that means that the more we are investigating new questions–to continue to be in a mode of inquiry–the better. This is something I’ve come to realize I’ve always believed, but have just recently started to learn how to articulate after spending time with good people like Kristen Eshleman and Amy Collier.

What’s needed, according to Dave Snowden, are “ways of measuring success without knowing in advance what that success may be.”

“So how do these new questions arise?” you ask. I believe that you have to continue to have your ground to ear and be in constant communication with your community.

In nearly every talk that I gave on OU Create this year, I’ve said that the platform does not do exactly what we had expected it to do when we adopted it. In fact, it does much more. We started OU Create with the thesis that it could serve as a platform for students portfolios and open courses in a very similar manner to how University of Mary Washington originally did it. But it is, after doing this for a few years, indeed, much more nuanced than that. And if I was to make one specific goal for OU Create in 2017, it would be to, better communicate that.

This post, a sort of end-of-the-year wrap up, is a step towards trying to pull together a better aggregated story as to what has and is happening with OU Create–though it’s really only a start. Yes, it still leans on metrics, but please don’t get distracted by those too much. They are merely a tool that serves as an anchor. Below the numbers I’ve linked to relevant blog posts, which I’m personally more interested in. I’d rather build towards stories and relationships than numbers. But numbers do make it easy to build an infographic… So one of those is at the bottom too.

Big Bucket Metrics

We had 1,691 domain orders in 2016. In total, we’ve had 3,767 orders since August 2014, so 45% of our user base joined this year.

Many of our users install applications on top of their domain to run it. The top five applications are WordPress, Drupal, Omeka, DokuWiki, and OwnCloud. Those five are followed by Scalar, MediaWiki, Moodle, Joomla, and Grav. It’s important to note that not all of our users utilize the applications in Installatron. We have many users that are using static HTML sites.

12,017 of our 24,466 all-time blog posts came in 2016. In 2015, we had 9,323 blog posts and 3,126 from August to December of 2014. I’m curious as to the amount of active bloggers, but this appears to me like people are doing different activities than blogging or else we would have seen bigger blog numbers. This is one metric that tells me that Domains is more than blogging on WordPress.

But that brings to me something anybody who gets in this space has to learn. The answer to the question of “What is everybody doing?” is “We don’t know.” And we’re proud that it’s that decentralized. We can give insight to what we come across but we don’t always have easy ways of coming across it. As an example,within the last few days we’ve discovered an open course called American Gangster: From Jay Gatsby to Jay Z that utilizes Hypothes.is and someone utilizing OU Create to host their own self-organized ListServ.

The Creaties

In April , we held the first annual Creaties, an award show dedicated to celebrating and showcasing the very best work on OU Create. Winners took home awards in categories such as Best Portfolio, Best Course Site, Best Wiki, and Best Community. 102 sites and posts were nominated, 2,683 online fan votes helped produce 31 total winners.

Further readings:

Support

This year we focused on building more robust support for OU Create users. In January, revamped support documentation was rolled out using Documentor. This documentation is Creative Commons licensed and is currently being utilized by Middlebury College, Coventry University, and Georgia State University. In February, we began supporting users with Freshdesk, an online customer support and ticketing solution, which notifies support staff automatically through an integration with a CTE Slack Channel. This year we responded to 112 support tickets.

Further Readings:

This Week on OU Create

In 2015, we started a blog that curates what our team considers the “best of” that particular week. Anoop Bal, who originally started the blog, left us for grad school (which is totally awesome) and, after a brief pause in publication, we’ve continued the blog with his spirit. This year we wrote 19 blog posts and highlighted 80 different users.

For the infographic, we’ve highlighted the course Making Modern America: Discovering the Great Depression and New Deal as well as the Global Engagement Fellows. The first, which we often refer to as simply New Deal, had students build out an Omeka site that contains 967 artifacts (or “items”), both historical and modern. Global Engagement Fellows blogged from 32 different countries this year.

We also highlighted a project in which we partnered with the Graduate College to do their first workshop series which focused on Digital Identity.

Faculty Development

This is another “bucket” which is hard to tell the complete story as nearly everything in which I’ve discussed previously in this post has some level of faculty development. We hosted four unique workshops for faculty that focused on OU Create and specific uses for them whether that was a way of teaching or, since we are currently migrating to Canvas, how to use OU Create inside of Canvas.

We also do classroom visits where we’ll show up to any classroom and either talk about OU Create or help students set it up. This year we did 34 of those.

We started doing more one-on-one consultations as a partnership with the Vice President of Research whose office has an initiative to assist faculty in build public presence of their identity, specifically as it related to Broader Impacts.

Tangentially, and not included on V1 on this infographic, John Stewart and Keegan Long-Wheeler ran two really excellent Faculty Learning Communities around gamification. The first, GOBLIN, is about gamification and is an OER available on OU Create. The second had faculty learn storytelling strategies and use Twine in conjunction with OU Create to build seven text-based games.

I’ve likely left out a lot in this post, but promise to continue building on top of this structure, so stick around for more. If you’re interested in chatting about Domains or OU Create, feel free to contact me. Also, considering coming to Domains 17, a conference we are hosting in OKC with Reclaim Hosting on June 5 and 6, 2017.

And here’s the fancy infographic (download high resolution version). All of the inspiration for this goes to Laura Gogia who has been doing some beautiful infographics on open dissertations. If you see ways to improve this or have questions, please let me know.

I’ve written previously about Nathan Gerth and the work he is doing at the Carl Albert Center, which houses a congressional archive. Nathan continues to really push me on thinking about how institutions can utilize web infrastructure. His OU Create projects like CAC Rockets and PIPC Votes are some of the best non-traditional (read: non-Wordpress) ways I’ve seen the platform used. PIPC Votes is a site that scrapes House of Representatives voting record sites and makes the data freely available:

This newest version now scrapes information from the Clerk of the House nightly and codes the “vote type” (e.g. amendment, final passage, moving the previous question) variable using a python script rather than relying on the judgment of individual coders

And his passion for digital curation is infectious. Lately, I’ve been thinking more about domains as an opportunity to not just be an artifact of learning in the way a digital badge tells you learning “happened.” I see so much benefit of thinking beyond their use as a portfolio of final work. Rather, I’ve been thinking about them as a continuously evolving artifact of the learning process. And it’s through this process of media making that students build toward a digital identity. Domains are not static, literally (mostly) or figuratively, thus they can manifest themselves very differently across a student’s tenure. I witness students change navigation, look and feel, writing style, etc. based off of how and where it’s being applied. A student might use it for a class in a very specific way, dip out of that voice for personal use, and then maybe dip into an entirely new voice for another class. It might evolve into separate spaces or applications that serve different needs. Some of my favorite work of my personal students leave the web as they leave the institution. Sometimes to be replaced by a more stripped down landing page or just permanently removed. However it may happen, these moments and the spaces in between can be like little snapshots taken at a moment in time.

So this has me thinking about how we can begin to capture these evolutions that take place. My first thought is Wayback Machine, the world’s gift to web nostaglia, which allows you to time travel through a domain and many people are already familiar with:

2005 version of ou.edu

I wrote in September about meeting with Middlebury’s Special Collections folks and hearing about how they are using archive.org’s service Archive-It to archive student work. This led to me having a discussion with our David Corbly, Director of Repository Services, of OU Libraries who runs OU’s own Archive-It solution. It seems to me that this is a good start but potentially unable to fulfill the large need of archiving as many sites as we have on OU Create (Archive-It is rather expensive for what it offers).

So I came back to Nathan to think through exploring other options and he came up with an idea that is very, very captivating. He is teaching a Digital Curation course in the Spring in our School of Library and Information Studies and is planning on having the students in the course prototype multiple techniques for doing this work both on the front-end side (scraping like Archive-It) as well as some back-end work with non-OU Create data.

Another great idea Nathan had was to have the students also propose strategies that OU could take in better preserving university web. It reminded me of a story when I was doing marketing work on the OU Research Campus and part of it was exploring the history of the campus. It was a naval base for a few years during WWII and was trasnferred back to the university afterwards.

Move to Oklahoma propaganda

What was fascinating to me was that I could read through boxes of meeting notes and historical records of the campus. The story of the campus had been preserved quite well. Nathan mentioned how much of that type of information such as university processes and forms are getting transferred to the digital space. Universities sometimes have university archivists, but we unfortunately don’t have a dedicated office (though the bulk of it is done quite well through goodfolks in our Western History Collection) . So building the foundation of a digital archiving strategy could be very productive of the institution by making these historical records more accessible. Part of that strategy would likely include recommendations towards some more complex questions about archiving such as what is inevitably publicly accessible. I am also fully aware that this can’t be a project that I, nor any one person, could conceivably support long term, so the idea of proposing some broader recommendation is very appealing.

But I look at how we are thinking about using the classroom as a space for testing potential endeavors and I can’t think of many better learning environments. Students are learning through the process of attempting to capture learning. It really is a beautiful thing. This is what gets me up every day. Its the reason teams like ours exist.

I hope I’m doing justice to Nathan’s vision. The archiving space and its complexities are spaces I’m just beginning to understand (and probably poorly… apologies to all digital archivists if this post reads a dumbdowning of your work! Give the new guy a break! ). I’m just grateful to find someone who is equally interested in preserving the bits and bytes of the web. Neither of us are making promises that any of this will work but I can vouche that I’m personally eager to explore.

A handful of blog posts have came out recently on Muhlenberg’s Domain of One’s Own project bergbuilds including a posts from Lora Taub (post) and Tim Clarke (post) at Muhlenberg and Lauren Brumfield (post) at Reclaim Hosting.

Lora’s post encouraged folks to get involved in this years OLC Solution Design Summit, which is actually where I first met Lora. I wrote this in April:

If they pull off their idea (I’m hoping someone from their team will write a post), it will be one of the more innovative approaches I’ve seen in holistically engaging a community in domains and digital literacy.

I continue to stand by that statement. Muhlenberg is utilizing their domains as a central space for students to think broadly about digital learning and digital scholarship as a student’s pre-orientation experience. From what I remember, students even move in to their dorm room early to partake in the week-long session

As someone who’s graduate experience was deeply impacted by a similar experience and as someone at a university that’s about to launch two residential colleges, I’m thinking more and more about how these types of experiences. Too often, digital is positioned as in conflict with the residential experience. I don’t want to hear another person lament about students learning at home in their pajamas, as if that’s vitriolic. I don’t want to hear another false argument about digital natives. I would rather see us explore, together, head-on the opportunities and challenge that digital space brings. If anything, let’s embrace the way that the two worlds have deeply merged.

I do believe that a good place to start building respect with the students by offering and supporting them with their own space. What better way to fully actualize the digital verison Virigina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own then a Muhlenberg-type of project? From Lora:

In fact, our tagline for this entire pre-orientation experience was, “A Dorm & A Domain” — emphasizing that a Muhlenberg experience is as much about staking out an online presence as it is setting up a dorm room or learning your way around campus.

Both Lora and Tim both touched on the ways which they’ve felt supported by the broader domains community as they’ve launched this project. Tim had these nice things to say:

To inform these efforts, we reached out for assistance to Adam Croom who kindly shared his afternoon with us fielding far ranging questions. It’s difficult to quantify Adam’s helpfulness, but it’s essetial to try. At the close of our online meeting, Adam encouraged us to continue to reach out, even offering to provide a clone of Create OU Support for us to customize. Adam’s efforts to work openly and to share everything from support documentation to learning community reading lists and curriculums will save us at Muhlenberg weeks, perhaps months, of effort. But more important, Adam’s, and Martha’s, and Tim’s, and Jim’s, and Lauren’s engagement with us will make our efforts better.

I have to say I really like this idea of working together. I’m always the first to say that what we are doing is, if anything, the opposite of innovative. One of the best things about the community is how much everybody wants to see the other person succeed. Create is only what it is because UMW is what it is and Emory, Davidson, BYU, VCU, Middlebury, CSU Channel Islands, Georgetown and many others are what they are. And the different ways in which institutions have reimagined it for their specific community is really, really gratifying to watch. It’s like, oh I don’t know, the web; small pieces loosely joined.

Some day I’ll probably stop gushing about domains and the web. But, until then, I’ll take my people over anybodys!

Last year, we launched a blog titled thisweekon.oucreate.com and a similar Twitter account @OU_Create to highlight some of our favorite OU Create content, mostly blogs from OU students and faculty, thanks to the good work of Anoopdeep Bal. I’m not sure I even know the full details, but the best answer is that we focused our highlighting attention on the Creaties and moved the This Week blog to the backburner. Then in July we had some staff turnover that caused us to hault the account altogether. BUT we are back on the horse!

The way that we do this is fairly simple. Every newly installed application gets plugged into our Community syndicator which runs on FeedWordPress. Though not every site has an RSS feed, we are currently syndicating 3,310 sites. We get these URLs by pulling them directly out of the Installatron database file and bulk subscribing to the newest posts. Then we read them (I use Reeder to do so), share our favorites in a Slack channel, and then John Stewart writes up a weekly roundup. Anddd that’s about it.

My thought is that the only way to know your community is to be of it and in it. We are proud to publicly offer a way to see the public work that exists within it as well. I’ve always liked to the think of OU Create as the best representation of a digital common area for the community and it’s fun tosee how people are still thinking up new ways to use the space.

For instance, Darren Purcell (who is has one of the most richest faculty OU Create spaces if I do say so myself) is using it in a freshman-level Geography class to teach students about mapping and GIS tool. I just saw a post today where Lexi McLane had used ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based mapping platform, to show high school graduation rates at a macro and micro level. It shows national, state, and regional (in fact her own hometown).

Not only is it personally contextualized but she was able to start to understand the influence how race and economics affect graduation rates:

Through the maps in my story map I compare areas with lower rates to areas with lower incomes and see a clear trend. Also groups with higher averages such as white and asian groups, are typically associated with higher income groups. The maps in my story map also show higher incomes around counties with high graduation rates.
I was surprised to find that the school I graduated from had such a high graduation rate when drop outs seemed so normal throughout high school. Also my high school was primarily hispanic and economically disadvantaged, meaning it should have some of the lowest graduation rates based on the national statistics. However, in 2014 Olustee Public High School had a 95 % graduation rate, putting my high school above the national average. – Lexi McLane

Another project I saw pop up this semester is the OU Integration Business Core program. IBC is a set of four courses students take in which throughout the courses they do market research and launch a product. The profit generated is then donated to a local company. All of the companies have a WordPress landing page (they use an OU purchasing tool for actual orders) and two of the companies are using OU Create:

I’ve said this time and time again, but I love the flexibility of the web to serve such vastly different needs. Both of these projects fall widely out of the scope of a traditional eportfolio, our original idea for OU Create, but show the creative ways for which the technology can be exploited by the users. Oh, and support these IBC projects if you know what’s good for you!

Yesterday I finished up the last installment of a six-week workshop series focused on assisting graduate students with understanding digital identity and the open web. I co-taught this with John Stewart who did much of the heavy lifting filling me for me a couple times when I wasn’t able to be available. This was also our first time to partner with the Clay Wesley in Graduate Student Life who was kind enough to organize, manage, and offer food for the event itself. I’ve spoken twice at their annual career development week and was humbled that the presentations were rated high enough to pique the college’s interest on expanding it into a more concerted effort.

The truth is a digital identity is not a tool or a website, and it can’t be fully actualized in a mere six weeks, but through the process of a building a website it can get folks started on a path and give them enough of knowledge to be armed with how to take ownership of their digital identity by giving them an environment where they are forced to put pen to paper. This fact was driven home quite well by Michael Thompson, who is our Director of Broader Impacts in the Office of the Vice President for Research, who, among other things, leads our faculty in workshops to help assist them in building and verbalizing their faculty identity. One of the comments he brought up multiple times was how identity is changing and fluid, which is so true. The more time I spend in this project, the more I see identity building as the opposite of a streamlined tech tool built to help you answer a pre-determined set of questions much like many social media profiles and e-portfolio solutions. The complexity of people demands flexibility and ownership.

The last week of the workshop was focused on digital scholarship. Digital scholarship is such a broad term and I wanted to pull examples of various ways of interpreting the notion of DS including how one’s own digital space(s) can reflect research, digital scholarship tools, digital and open-access journals, research group sites, and fully-fledged online research projects. It’s certainly nowhere near exhaustive but these are references I point to often. Below a brief summary of the sites we went over:

TAGS – Twitter archive to Google Sheet tool built developed and maintained by Martin Hawksey.

Hypothes.is – An annotation tool that can act as a layer on top of any public website. See this Guardian article for how an example of how Climate Feedback is utilize the tool as a way to be “a scientific reference to reliable information on climate change” within popular media.

Tableau – a visualization tool with a free offering for students. See Austin’s Teacher Turnover for an example of various ways structured data can be visualized for storytelling.

Jove – calls itself the “the world’s first and only peer reviewed scientific video journal.” An example of a digital version of traditional researcher as referenced in Martin Weller’s article.

Inhabiting the Anthropocene – a group blog written by an interdisciplinary group of University of Oklahoma scholars interested in how humans have and continue to transform the Earth.

Community Informatics – an example of a research website. This research site began on OU Create and has since migrated off OU Create due to the faculty member now be located in Boston at Simmons College. This site is made up of a WordPress information page as well as an evolving wiki hosted that uses the application DokuWiki.

Situating Chemistry – a collaborative research database and map that investigates the sites where chemistry was practiced between 1760-1840 led by University of Oklahoma staff member and historian John Stewart. This project is built on the Drupal platform.

New Deal – an undergraduate research project at the University of Oklahoma utilizing the Omeka platform. For more information, see a more detailed blog post I previously wrote.

Digital Humanities Toolbox – A very well organized and much more exhaustive list of tools that one can use for projects including mapping, text analysis, audio, annotation, and research tools. Very applicable to non-humanities fields.